


vernon boyd vs. the infinite sadness

by la_loba



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Ableism, Gen, Islamophobia, Nobody is super nice or super willing to talk about their feelings, Original Female Character of Color, Pre-Bite, Self-Loathing, Why aren't we discussing Jeff Davis's trashy approach to racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-25
Updated: 2014-06-25
Packaged: 2018-02-06 03:25:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1842583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/la_loba/pseuds/la_loba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“People call me Boyd now,” you blurt out. Your voice cracks somewhere in the middle and you want to disappear: as annoying as the concept is of wanting an older boy to like you, you do want Derek Hale to think you’re cool. He has the leather jacket, the old familiarity of being your sister’s former boyfriend, the Camaro parked outside of the 7-11. He is, you realize uncomfortably, someone that Erica would probably swoon over in her Teen Vogue magazine.</p><p>(Not that you want Erica to swoon over you—it’s just that Derek Hale is something you had envisioned your father being when he was young. Sharp jaw, sharper cheekbones, the sheer talent of being able to walk into a room and having everyone’s heads turn. And Gifted, impossibly Gifted by the virtue of being themselves.)</p><p>--</p><p>Vernon Milton Boyd IV beats the shit out of Stiles Stilinski and Life returns the favor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	vernon boyd vs. the infinite sadness

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Vernon](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1046198) by [tzzzz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tzzzz/pseuds/tzzzz). 



> I always wanted more of a backstory for Boyd (and everyone else, really). Stiles being asshole is canon. Actually, everyone but Scott McCall being a raging asshole is canon.

i.  
You’re only aware of being different from your classmates in the same way that you’re different from your sisters. Dana, the oldest of your sisters, is Gifted in such a way that you have never been able to ignore. Your mother cries the day that she gets accepted into Mensa, and embarrasses the whole family by telling everyone she sees (up to and including Mrs. Stilinski, the town librarian, who has a Problem Child that literally everyone knows about and despairs of). Alicia is Gifted by the virtue of being the youngest and cutest of your family; she’s doe-eyed enough to enter pageants and shrewd enough to win them.

You, however, aren’t Gifted at all. Your mother worries about you enough to turn her hair grey; you’ve heard her speaking over the phone to your father about how little you speak in class or to anyone at all. Dana tells you that you are “probably some kind of retard”, and you don’t dispute it. Neither your teacher or classmates interest you; you spend the whole day wishing you were somewhere else. 

Your father, however, tells you and your mother in turn that you are nothing to worry about. This is easy enough for him to say—he has been living in New York since you were six, making what you what you have always considered to be “mean art”. Despite the lie, you take some small amount of comfort in it. You love your father with an intensity that does not match any of your siblings’ or your mother’s, even; Dana refuses to speak about him, Alicia only adores him abstractly, and your mother has loved him significantly less since the divorce. “Leave the boy alone,” your father tells your mother, laughing over the phone, “he’ll be alright”.

You appreciate being told that you are Alright, but it does needle at you whenever you’re forced to think about it. Your father is a man that people talk about in awed whispers; he isn’t incredibly famous for his art, but is known enough to survive comfortably off of the profit and to be discussed in magazines. He’s so handsome, your father, and built in a way that your body is already learning how to mimic. He is built like an era, his face is like a poem, the energy inside of him palpable, everyone loves him too much already—you are certain that this is why people occasionally cross the street when the two of you amble down the street together. 

You and Alicia and Dana are all meant to visit your father over the summer when The Terror begins, and things become more complicated. You are sure—as certain as your father in the greatest, as certain as you are that Dana is the wisest—that something is intrinsically wrong with you, with Dana, with Alicia, with your mother. You’re Different and a Problem. Not a cute, “oh what will we do with him” problem like the Stilinski boy, but a Different that is to be feared and eradicated. 

ii.  
You’re not especially aware of 9/11 as it happens in reality. You’re eight, and you know that the towers collapsed, you know that it’s a case of bad people doing bad things, but you aren’t sure of how to put it all together to where any of it impacts you.

That is, besides for your father dying.

It’s incredibly strange, his death. You know your father to be a giant of a man, with a laugh as big as his body—you don’t even know how he dies, not until later. Instead, you get the tired police report of your father that Dana reads to you after bedtime. Vernon Milton Boyd III, six feet, four inches, black male, two hundred and thirty pounds. Found dead on 9/11 at 4:30 p.m. Cause of death: a woman, desperate and keening, launching herself from the window, only to land on top of your father as he walked to god knows where. They’d been trampled to death by other New Yorkers. 

Your mother cries for days, and you’d assume that this is why she doesn’t leave the house, but you’re old enough to realize that isn’t strictly true. It’s mostly because of her hijab, and the fact that she drives out of town to the mosque to pray, instead of heading to St. Phillip’s downtown. It’s because of Dana’s hijab, too, and the way Mr. Whittemore sneers at her when she skateboards to Beacon Hills High School.

It’s because of you and Alicia, both of you with your skin dark like secrets. 

Your mother stops letting you take your prayer beads out of the house. The one time you manage to, she asks you to call it a rosary instead of a misbaha. She says “Be safe”. She says, “Keep your head down”. She says, “Keep Allah in your mouth but do not speak of him in public”, and she apologizes and apologizes and apologizes. 

Your mother is so small, now. You could push her over with a whisper.

iii.   
They throw eggs at your house, once or twice or seven times. It’s juvenile and Dana is incensed; she storms over to the Daehlers’ house and insists that Matt has been vandalizing your home. He has been, of course he has been, you’ve known he’s probably been the culprit since Alicia came home with sand in her hair, talking about how Matt told her to “go back” to where she’d come from.

“Maine?” she says, doubtfully, “why would I wanna go back to Maine? We had to stay with Djadeti and she smells like bad milk ‘cause she’s so old now. ”

“They weren’t talking about Djadeti, stupid,” Dana says scornfully, “No one cares about our dumbass grandma; they just think we’re not American and that means we’re gonna shoot up the schools.”

Alicia squints at her. “But we were born here?”

Dana snorts. “Yeah, well, I didn’t say it made sense or anything.”

Then you’re eight and someone puts “GO HOME MUZZLIM” on your locker. You’re nine and being forced to walk with both Alicia and Dana on the way home from school, because your mother asks you to. 

You’re ten and an older boy puts a cigarette out on your wrist while you watch, feeling as if you aren’t even there. Derek Hale, who’s your sister’s age, comes running from out of nowhere, his voice owning a terrible steadiness even as he shoves you out of the way.

“You goddamn son of a bitch,” says Derek Hale, and your mother packs up and moves all of you a few streets down, where the income is probably a little less but at least no one tries to destroy you, even minutely.

iv.  
You only meet Erica because of Scott McCall. Scott McCall’s usually at the hospital, where Dana has been doing volunteer work. She wants to be a surgeon, which fits—Dana is and has always been cool and precise—but she trails after Melissa McCall more often than not. It makes very little sense to you, because Melissa McCall is just a nurse, but then you come visit at the hospital and you understand, just a little bit.

Melissa is full of dry humor and sharp wit and drinks her coffee black, speaking absentmindedly to Dana while she’s charting. She loves her son so much that it fills up her entire body. She is, actually, like your mother used to be before The Terror happened. 

Scott’s there because his parents are going through a nasty divorce of their own, hunched over his English homework while his mother runs around. He is quiet, like you, but with a stir of energy that you haven’t harnessed in ages. He draws battleships in the margins of his notebook paper, humming quietly to himself. “I think Star Wars is cool; one of the old ones was on TV last night” he tells you, once.

You shrug. “I didn’t see it.” Scott deflates slightly, and then you, remembering your manners belatedly, ask “…Did you?”

Scott bites his lip, sour-faced. “I don’t have a TV at home.” Then, brightening: “But Stiles does! We watched it at his house, one time, the one with the clones? So cool. I wish I had a clone; I’d make it beat up Jackson Whittemore or something.”

He turns and says, “What about you?” 

You shrug; you can barely stand yourself, what would you do with a duplicate? Scott deflates entirely this time, embarrassed and scribbling down the wrong answer for English. You want to point out that Puck and Robin Goodfellow are the same person, but you don’t have any energy—Dana is a sudden saving grace in worn-out jeans, commanding you to get your backpack and hurry up, she’s got places to be.

You see the tiniest slip of a girl watching you both from the corner of the children’s ward. Her hair is like straw and she’s staring at your sister with unchecked envy. You stare back and she flinches, then straightens up and pops up a defiant middle finger.

“What?” Dana asks, the corner of her mouth quirking even though she doesn’t want it to. “What’s funny?”

v.  
Your sister stops wearing her hijab as often, and then does away with it entirely. She rolls her eyes at the Quran in your mother’s bookshelf, talks about how being a good muslimah is “archaic” and “oppressive” and “stupid”. She says she’s an atheist and shuns your mother in her own home, barging past her. 

You ask her, once, if this has anything to do with Derek Hale asking her to the Spring Fling. She shoves you, hard, and you never bring it up again. Derek’s family is about as Anglo as it gets—you understand it, sort of. Scott had come over once and asked why your mother was kneeling in the living room with her head on the ground and you had mumbled an embarrassed “I don’t know, she’s so weird sometimes”. 

You don’t think Derek would care much (if only because Derek is obsessed with basketball and the cello, weirdly) but Dana is frantic. She has a framed picture of Richard Dawkins in her room. She buries the hijabs in her closet and starts wearing halter tops—your mother detests them, but you think, maybe, that it’s good for Dana. Maybe not the whole snickering fit she has when your mother loudly makes du’a in the house, but the confidence she wears on her body, false or otherwise. 

And then Derek takes Paige to Homecoming the next year—pretty Paige who is shy and quiet and pale and everything your sister is not--, and it’s like your mother and the Terror all over again. It has less to do with Paige and Derek and more to do with Dana and her perception of herself, you realize, but you don’t tell her so because she pinches viciously.   
It’s odd, but no one talks about it and Dana doesn’t even cry: she seems almost relieved. She keeps the halter tops and the short skirts, but she stops pretending to throw out the hijabs. She finishes the year early and applies to Princeton; the first word out of her mouth when she opens the acceptance letter at dinner is “Bismallah”, then “Bismallah ir-Rahman, ir-Rahim”. 

vi.  
Dana goes to Princeton, your mother starts pulling your father’s paintings out of the garage, and Alicia wins Little Miss Beacon Hills. She’s all big curls and warbling Nina Simone songs; Mrs. Stilinski pronounces her to be “utterly charming” when you’re forced to take her to the library. You like Mrs. Stilinski because she has a laugh that’s entirely too loud for the library she works in, and she doesn’t make fun of Alicia for always taking out Sideways Stories from Wayside School with the rest of her book load.

She’s also the only one who doesn’t ask you about Alicia when she goes missing. That’s something that even Dana and your mother don’t do—unlike with your father dying, all they do is talk about Alicia. The entirety of your house is like a shrine to her; you had once caught your mother sifting through her baby clothes and crying quietly into them. Dana mentions her every time she calls: not by her actual name, but insinuated in the soft way she says, “You okay, Vern?”

Even Scott (who is not your best friend, but who definitely feels like it sometimes) asks about her, haltingly and unsure. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asks, and you turn him away from your front door so many times that he stops coming by. 

“You’re not even my friend,” you tell him once. You feel like you have a storm inside of you. “You’re that spazz’s friend. Go be his friend, asshole.” 

Mrs. Stilinski wears a wig and takes it off to make you laugh one afternoon. You’re sure that she only likes you as much as she does because she doesn’t know you called her son a spazz one time, and that she doesn’t know that you’ve both meant it and said it before. You don’t even feel that bad for not liking Stiles, which is worse—Scott had told him about Alicia and he’d seemed to vibrate on the spot, telling you all that you had never cared about rape and murder statistics for children. 

“It’s high, it’s like unbelievably high, dude and did you know that a lot of rapists don’t even go to court and honestly it’s been like five months, don’t you think that you should probably stop milking this, I know you’re totally milking it, you have that look in your eye and I know my mom totally gave you that big ol’ sympathy hug yesterday—”  
Your mother told you that no one who keeps Allah in their mouth is quick to raise a violent hand, but your mother isn’t here. Your mother doesn’t even leave the house anymore. She doesn’t know what you do or don’t do. 

You beat the living shit out of Stiles Stilinski. It feels delicious. 

(Erica, who is in your Science class and lingers around your locker when she’s not in the hospital doesn’t speak to you for a week. It doesn’t feel nearly as good as breaking Stiles’s nose). 

vii.  
One time, you see Derek Hale in the supermarket looking haunted and twice as bulky as he was when he rode a dirt bike to school with your sister perched on the handlebars. He’s probably back to figure out the last of the life insurance with Laura: you can see the faint shape of her in the Camaro, performing a practiced swoop near her eye that reminds you of Alicia preparing for pageants. 

You say, “Hi” and it’s so uncertain that Derek doesn’t seem to know what to do with his face. 

“Hi,” says Derek. “Hey, um, Dana’s brother? Vernon?”

“People call me Boyd now,” you blurt out. Your voice cracks somewhere in the middle and you want to disappear: as annoying as the concept is of wanting an older boy to like you, you do want Derek Hale to think you’re cool. He has the leather jacket, the old familiarity of being your sister’s former boyfriend, the Camaro parked outside of the 7-11. He is, you realize uncomfortably, someone that Erica would probably swoon over in her Teen Vogue magazine.

(Not that you want Erica to swoon over you—it’s just that Derek Hale is something you had envisioned your father being when he was young. Sharp jaw, sharper cheekbones, the sheer talent of being able to walk into a room and having everyone’s heads turn. And Gifted, impossibly Gifted by the virtue of being themselves.)

“Okay,” says Derek and he makes it sound so simple. You want to push him; you can’t even get Scott to call you Boyd half the time. He remembers when you had a mouth of full of braces and refused to talk at all: he gives you an absentminded “Yeah, okay” when you ask him to call you Boyd. Your mother doesn’t call you anything at all. “How’s Dana?”

Dana has left Princeton and is in Oxford for medical school. She had skyped you last weekend out of a sense of routine more than anything; the two of you had had a three minute conversation before she’d happily ended it, asking you to make du’a for your mother if you could remember to. She is the only one who calls you Vern still, and you don’t scowl at her because you feel like that’d tip the scales over. She already refuses to come home.

“It’s not that I don’t miss you guys,” she’d said robotically over skype, fiddling with her heart models, “it’s just—I don’t know, I just—”

“She’s great,” you say, “everyone’s doing great.” 

viii.  
Your mother spends all day in the bedroom, her face turned to the wall. She doesn’t pray, she doesn’t yell at you for coming home late, she doesn’t eat. 

“Sometimes people get sad, Boyd,” says Mrs. Stilinski, “and sometimes they just don’t stop. My mother was the same way.” She smells like honey and vanilla, her hands are calm on the stacks of books in the same way that her son’s aren’t. “You know, I used to think everyone got like that, but depression is a little deeper. A little heavier. It’s like being constantly stuck, maybe.” 

You know that: Mrs. Stilinski isn’t telling you anything that you haven’t already read and memorized from the DSM. “Yeah,” you say instead, “I just. I don’t know what to, um. Do about it.”

Mrs. Stilinski shrugs, but it isn’t flippant, it isn’t cruel, it doesn’t irritate you. “I don’t think there’s anything you can do.”

Stiles runs in, talking a mile a minute about something that’s only barely adjacent to what you’re supposed to be researching for a shared World History, and then stops suddenly. His face twists, and he says, “Oh, are you busy?”

“Stiles,” Mrs. Stilinski says, “Relax.” She puts a hand on your shoulder and squeezes; you want to lean into it but you don’t want to have to deal with Stiles nattering in your ear about it for the rest of your life. 

Of course, it comes anyways. Stiles corners you after school, tries halfheartedly at jerking you over to his bike and says, “She’s my mom, dude. Back off.” He says it with the frantic energy of someone who thinks they’re in danger of losing something. You’re not surprised; Stiles Stilinski loves his mother almost ferociously, the way you remember loving your father. 

He’s trying to shake you a little but you’re taller than him, built like the oak trees that used to line the backyard of your old house. It feels a bit like the time Alicia had annoyed you to hell and back about wanting to go ice skating even though your mother had told you repeatedly not to leave after dark because of The Terror and possible Incidents that could occur (her eyes had flicked to the inside of your wrist, where the burn still lingered, perfect and circular in its cruelty) but she’d bothered you so much that you’d told to get out, just go, “Jesus Christ, just stay out there—just sleep in the rink if you love it that much, Alicia” and—

You pull yourself away from him and say, “Don’t touch me, Stilinski.”

You say, “Like I give a shit about you or your weird mommy issues.”

You say, “Everyone used to call you the Problem Kid, you think I don’t remember? Nobody could fucking stand you.”

You say, “Not even your stupid fucking mom.”

ix.  
You dream of Alicia every night. She gets a little older each time. In one, she’s dressed in red and dancing with Stiles Stilinski of all people. In another, she’s got one of Dana’s old chokers around her throat that looks like it’s embedding itself into her skin—“Take it off,” you demand, and she does, her head falling to the ground. It should horrify you but instead you still feel pathetically grateful that you get to see her, even a deeply fucked up dream scenario. 

The Sherriff visits and tells you somberly that Alicia’s probably never going to turn up, and you tell him to get the fuck out of your house. You throw your prayer beads out after, because clearly Allah isn’t watching out for you. He hasn’t been in a while; you feel like Dana all over again. You feel like you’re imploding and it’s a near-constant state of being—you have this weird, angry sort of sadness curled up inside of your chest and it makes no sense, but:

“You’re a complex person, Boyd,” says Mrs. Stilinski, “just like anyone else.”

She’s sicker than she was last year and the year before. Last time, she’d shown you the peach fuzz on her head, but it’s wilted since then. It looks like it hurts for her to stand; you’ve taken to helping her out to the car when Stiles isn’t there. 

In between classes, Scott asks you if you’ll be okay “with, you know, Mrs. S and all. She’s not looking too hot.”

“She’s not my mom, McCall,” you snort. “That’s all Stiles’s deal.”

“Well,” he says, “she kind of is, though.”

x.  
But then you’re reading police reports over and over trying to relearn your father and you find out he was on his way to see his new girlfriend when he died. His name girlfriend was named Janet, had been a painter like him and had a pretty, bird-like quality to her that you have never had the patience for. 

Her last name was the same as Mrs. Stilinski’s maiden name (Kotsiopoulos, easy and strange enough to remember). It makes sense, being as she’s Mrs. Stilinski’s cousin twice removed or something—insignificant enough for it to slip by, important enough for it to hurt.

“I didn’t know,” she says, when you ask her, “I’m sorry, Boyd, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.” She reaches for you, her eyes soft like they had steeled themselves against being when Alicia disappeared, but you’re running and running and running and—

xi.  
Of course you let Derek bite you, why wouldn’t you?

It has always been so easy for you to destroy yourself.


End file.
